Tag Archives: short stories

Time always slips by so fast during the holidays, doesn’t it? I was waiting for the notice that an anthology I contributed to had gone live. The final deadline was mid-November, and NaNo kept me busy and left me exhausted as December started. So it took me about a week to learn the anthology had already gone live.

Then it took me a few days to make sure it was listed on my Amazon author page with my own chapbooks and collection.

This flash anthology was put together by and for students of Holly Lisle. These are all very short stories, of five hundred words or less, created after her free flash fiction class. They lean toward the fantastic, but I believe we include every major genre. The great thing for you is that the ebook version is free, and available in multiple formats. (You can of course get a dead tree version if you decide to collect everyone’s autographs to say you ‘read us when…’)

I write some stuff that could be classed as urban fantasy. (It’s not ready for prime time) But I made the trigger event be in 2016 and to my total dismay I discovered a perfect theme song for my lead… that came out about two years later. I cannot move the trigger event, and the world has changed so they can’t get it later when it really came out.

Crane Gears by Kevin Utting, attributed under Creative Commons 2.0

I would love having my lead use a lyric’s text to gird themselves as bad things go down. Everything is dark in my current chapter, and even taking heart is a good thing.

I will probably find a weaker song, or just have it on my playlist when I write for battle.

What, then should a collection of gemmed necklaces be? A pirate’s treasure, of course.

Dig among within the treasure chest for the prettiest gems…

Another milestone! I’ve published my first dead tree book of fiction. This is a collection of my short fiction from 2015. I finished five collections, and themed each collection on gems for the cover art: garnet, amber, lapis, citrine, and opal. Don’t we all like something that’s shiny or sparkly? I always wanted to make the entire year available as one collection. A handful of stories at a time was not enough when I was having book binges before I wrote. I had a couple of requests for paperback editions of the earlier collections, but they’re much too short to be worth the physical copy overhead. This time you have the choice of ebook or paperback.

This paperback and ebook editions include all the stories in the five necklace collections, plus two extras. One was part of an invitational Advent project, and the other was specifically written to be a bonus for the 2015 collection. That makes thirty-seven tales of fantasy and science fiction in the Necklace of Gems collection. All are short, but some are part of a larger story, like the SF Curiosity Station.

And now it’s time to pick a new theme for my fiction collections for 2016, so I’ll try to make a good one…

And if you want to give my fic a try or don’t want to wait for the next omnibus, the smaller collections should do:

It’s been a frantic year, but here’s my fifth collection of short stories! During NaNo yet! It’s a challenge to carve any time out of the mad NaNo rush, but here it is.

Sometimes it’s after all seems lost that we see the real person…

Futures as cloudy as opals…

Despair grinds its victims into nothing unless they can seize any chance to escape its doom. The zombie apocalypse may arrive in the little things in a morning routine, without the screaming and running. Research and development is not just for the sciences, but also for ambitious young wizards on a budget. A veteran of a lunar civil war battle deals with forced retirement and traumatic memories.

Seizing the your future is not a guarantee in these stories, sometimes it’s only the beginning.

Progress! I released my second collection of short stories, in another mix of fantasy and science fiction. One woman wants a quiet and peaceful home after threat and trauma, a part-time smuggler needs a safe place to hide smuggled hootch, and a young man isn’t sure if it is just jealousy when he doesn’t trust the new magic apprentice. Do invasions end in disarray or in a whimper?

I’m already at work on the next collection for sometime next month. It will be challenging because we have some paving repairs and gutter replacements scheduled. I’m hoping to finish a series of flash stories into a space gothic mystery. An isolated mansion on a lonely moor really doesn’t seem like that big jump to a space station in the outer solar system to me. The setting and characters are ready, but the plot just sits there or veers away from gothic romance into SF practicality. I’m hoping to do a collection every month for the rest of the year.

NaNo is starting to loom as well. November was so far away, but now it’s only a bit over three months. I think I may try for a SF story this year, something simpler so I can publish without a paid editor.